fiction

creative non-fiction

Tahir Hamut

translated by Darren Byler & Dilmurat Mutellip

Translators’ Note

A city between Beijing and Baghdad. A city south of Siberia, north of the Himalayas; an oil town booming in the desert. This is Tahir Hamut’s Ürümchi. Written over eight years these poems narrate how Tahir has been seduced by the gray streets of a Chinese city – the capital of the expansive Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. They show us how despite himself he can’t escape; a rural boy from Kashgar has been captured by an urban world. They are poems filled with longing and exhaustion, enchantment and release.

Like most of Tahir’s work these poems refuse extravagance. They build a persona of the city out of textures and feelings, and slowly, reluctantly, this world comes alive. There is a foreboding here that hints at the difficulties of minority life in China’s most ethnically-diverse city. The millions of migrants who have come or been forced to leave over the past decade make appearances as fragile lovers, water splattered, and worthless stones. Tahir puts on his skin in this city every day, but at night he prowls and looks for clarity. As one of the leaders of the modernist movement in Uyghur poetry, Tahir has been writing poems for over two decades, but the poignancy of his voice has never been stronger than in his most recent burst of writing. What emerges in the play of Tahir’s most recent work is a renewed sense of vision; around the folds of his playful turns of phrase are deeply-honed edges of seriousness.

Ürümchi

A city.
Inside the dead ice
its significance removed
by a cold wind that remains from long ago.
Soaked to the bone
a reflection of stars on the water;
I saw sobbing in broad daylight
where steam seeped out from underground.

A city—
A repeated, chaotic story,
but, I am removed from it.
Even
on a sunny day long years ago,
when a frail girl disappeared from this city,
fearing love.
She didn’t want to understand
the Uyghur words “I love you!”

A city,
as exhausted as I am;
A city,
which abandoned the spring and autumn;
A city,
Fading away in the fog.March 2007

City Night

From the airport to the train station and bus station
Myriad people emerge
Crazily they throw themselves at the city
Seeping with anger into the ground like dirty water, splattered
But I enter its night, walking

Glimmering in front of my eyes
Stubborn streets, angry cars, humpbacked buildings, glaring lamps, immoral
Roads, lonely trash, beautiful dungeons, naked concrete
I have come again, as I often come
Yet it is as if I have never been here before
The prowess of the city, the gift of the night
To become a black cat, a white goat
Crossing in front of me on and on
This is all I can do:
The mountain and I hold the two hands of the city
And pull it in opposite directions
Actually
I am not interested in anything about this city
I don’t even think of it as a proper place to die
It is just that its night is crazy about me
Out of pity I stroke its head1 and look into its shifty eyes
Grasp its hand and pull it down
Wearing its fog, I lie with it

1. In Uyghur this refers to the actions of friends and relatives toward someone in pain. ↑

Tahir Hamut was born in 1969 in a small town near Kashgar, in the southwest of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. He published his first poem in 1986, and has since been recognized as one of the foremost modernist poets writing in Uyghur. His poetry has appeared in translation in Crazy Horse, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Off the Coast. Since the late ‘90s he has worked as a film director, and has founded his own production company Izgil, which specializes in documentaries, advertisements and music videos. He lives in Ürümchi, Xinjiang’s capital with his wife and two daughters.

Darren Byler is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington, where he studies the aesthetics and politics of urban life in Chinese Central Asia. His translations have appeared in Guernica, Pathlight, and Off the Coast.

Dilmurat Mutellip is a poet and the principle educator of a network of publically-funded vocational schools in Xinjiang. A leading voice in Uyghur modernist poetics, he is a frequent organizer of poetry salons and lectures.